Casey R. Barrier

Casey R. Barrier serves as Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College, with office location in Dalton 306 and contact email cbarrier@brynmawr.edu. His research integrates historical materialism with archaeological practice to examine global cultural transformations.

His educational background includes:

• Ph.D. from the University of Michigan
• M.A. from the University of Alabama

Barrier's work centers on world-historical transitions including agricultural shifts, sedentism/urbanism development, and capitalist wage-labor expansion. He investigates energy-technology dynamics, political economy of surplus, and dialectical time-space relations within cultural totalities. His scholarship critically analyzes censorship of materialist and socialist theories in 20th-century academia and their contemporary legacies, positioning him at the intersection of archaeological practice and critical theory.

Recent publications reveal concentrated research on North American archaeology (Cahokia region, American Southeast) and Rapa Nui, employing historical materialism to decode urban transformations, surplus systems, and ritual practices. Methodologically, he pioneers integration of LiDAR, geophysical surveys, and interdisciplinary analysis of plant/animal remains to reconstruct past societies.